Good Life
by LadySilver
Summary: After the vampire uprising, the world becomes a better place for supernaturals. AU.


_A/N: A quick one-shot in fulfillment of a prompt in an AU Bingo game I'm playing. Comments are always welcome._

**The Good Life**

by LadySilver

The vampires rose up, just as they had been threatening for centuries. They rose up in cities and villages all over the world at the same time, a coordinated attack. When the dust had settled, the screaming stopped, and the blood finished running in the streets, most of the human population was dead. Some were turned. The world as anyone had known it was obliterated.

Annie was the first to venture forth to view the world that had been left behind. None of the three of them had dared leave their house while the massacre was in action, did their best to present the building as abandoned, uninteresting. They either succeeded, or the vampires really weren't interested in them.

The ghosts she met-the ones who hadn't already figured out how to cross through their doors-were terrified, many still not fully understanding that they had been killed. Their gratitude for Annie, for someone who knew what was going on and could tell them what to do, was immediate and overwhelming. She helped some cross, set others on paths that she hoped would lead to their crossing, and quickly became a strange kind of celebrity.

It wasn't long before the new ghosts she met greeted her as if they had known she was coming. "_You're _Annie?" they asked, over and over. They threw their arms out to welcome her in the hug meant for a long awaited visitor and sighed in tremendous relief. Those who weren't ready to move on attached themselves to her as if they couldn't imagine a better friend to have. For a person whose social interactions had so long been limited to what George, Mitchell, and Nina could offer, her newfound popularity was a dream come true.

Mitchell's experience was similar. The vampires assumed that he had been one of their number during the uprising. His reputation of depravity made it easy for those who knew of it to overlook his recent transgression into pacifism. None of them knew how he had hid and done what little he could to stop them. Nor did he ever correct them when they called him a hero.

The vampires came to him for his knowledge on how to live and survive without feeding, now that most of the humans were dead and none of them had much choice in the matter. His old reasons were forgotten, relegated to a kind of curious myth. Oddly, without the constant presence of humans, the constant smell of their blood and heat and the sounds of their pulses ever beating around him, Mitchell discovered that his vampire urges diminished, and nearly disappeared.

George and Nina expected that their story would be very different. The vampires had made their feelings for werewolves abundantly clear. And, as the slaughter raged around them, they started making plans for how to escape, though neither knew where they could possibly go, or what any of this would mean for their as-yet-unborn child. In the end, their plans were unnecessary.

Far more werewolves existed than anyone had suspected, their numbers revealed in full as soon as it became clear that hiding one's supernatural state was now pointless. More werewolves had been created during the uprising as those already cursed bit and scratched loved ones and friends in desperate hope of saving their lives somehow, no matter the cost. Now that they knew of each other, now that they weren't each trying to eke out a survival alone, the werewolves organized. The first thing they did was put a stop to the underground werewolf fights. The second thing they did was form a pact, a peace-treaty of sorts, that allowed those afflicted to live their human lives as undisturbed as they could in the new world, and to be provided with places of safety during the full moon.

The vampires rose up expecting to reclaim a world they thought had been stolen from them, to repaint it in blood. When the dust had settled, they discovered they had their hands full learning to be the keepers and creators of life rather than the destroyers. More importantly, they discovered that they _wanted_ to.

And, though no one would have predicted it or believed it if anyone had, George, Nina, Annie, and Mitchell discovered that, once they accepted that there was no going back to the way the world used to be, they were pretty okay with what it had become.

END

_A/N: Fulfills AU Bingo square #7: Post-apocalyptic_


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